1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a transportation technique for transporting, for example, elongated film-shaped members which is flexible, and to an exposure technique and a manufacturing technique that utilize the transportation technique. The present invention also relates to a device manufacturing technique that utilizes this exposure technique and manufacturing technique.
2. Description of Related Art
In an exposure apparatus that is used for manufacturing an element such as a semiconductor element or liquid crystal display element, a typical exposure object has conventionally been a flat plate-shaped object which has high rigidity such as a semiconductor wafer or a glass substrate which have been coated with photoresist. Recently, in order to efficiently manufacture devices having a large area, an elongated film-shaped member which is flexible and can be stored by being wound up into a roll shape have been used as an exposure object. Note that in the present specification, for the exposure, in addition to a technique exposing an object by exposure light via a mask pattern and a projection optical system, a technique drawing a predetermined pattern onto the object by a charged particle beam such as an electron beam may also be employed.
In order to expose a predetermined pattern onto this elongated film-shaped member, conventionally, stretching the film-shaped member between two stationary rollers, and moving the film-shaped member continuously in a constant direction relative to the exposure area between the rollers in a state of keeping the tension of the film-shaped member constant (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-098718 or the corresponding United States Patent Publication No. 2006/0066715).
In a conventional apparatus that exposes a film-shaped member, because the two rollers over which the film-shaped member is stretched are stationary and the film-shaped member moves while sliding over the top thereof, there is a possibility that the positional accuracy (i.e., the positioning accuracy relative to a target position over a time series) of the film-shaped member will be decreased due to vibration or the like. Due to this decrease in the positional accuracy, there is a possibility that the resolution of the pattern to be exposed will be decreased and that the overlay accuracy will also be decreased during overlay exposure.